"In 'What is an author?' [4], Michel Foucault says we are 'accustomed to presenting the author as a genius.' We see the author as the 'genial creator' of work in which he gives us, 'with infinite wealth and generosity,' an inexhaustible world of meanings. (Being 'creative' always has a positive ring, whatever is produced!) Foucault says that the author does not 'precede' the work: ideas and meanings are already there and the author's role is to 'choose,' to filter and synthesise to create output. (Foucault also emphasises 'limiting' and 'excluding'). The author's role is to limit the proliferation of meanings and present a personal view of the world. Yet the 'genius author' is represented as a continual source of invention–the opposite of his genuine function."

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"Yes you know there's this view that only special people are creative and it's not me. It's not it's not anybody I really know. It's a very isolated sort of genius you know to be really creative. And you know people doubt their own strengths and their own capacities. So I meet all kind of people who don't really get much fulfilment from the work they do. You know they just get through it and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do. And couldn't imagine doing anything else. You know if you set and don't this anymore they wouldn't' know what you were talking about because this is who they are. You know I mean like I don't know what else I would do. They are so to speak in their element. And so the book is about that. It's about the journeys people took to discover their own talents and what difference it made in their lives. And I talk to all kinds of people. It's not just interviews. But the book is seasoned as you know with interviews with people in science in business in the arts in sports in technology all kinds of different fields and what's interesting to me is of course it's different for everybody and this is really a key point you know that human ability and talent is highly diverse. You know what turns somebody on might totally turn somebody else off. What excites some propel does not excite other people and I know when I am signing the book these days I always ask people what they do. And when they tell me I ask them if they like it. And I always think it's great when people say I love it. Because you just never [inaudible].'"

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"Design thinking is ... a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Like [Thomas] Edison's painstaking innovation process, it often entails a great deal of perspiration. ...

Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the development process – the point where designers, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of innovation, come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea. To be sure, this approach has stimulated market growth in many areas by making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies. During the latter half of the twentieth century design became an increasingly valuable competitive asset in, for example, the consumer electronics, automotive, and consumer packaged goods industries. But in most others it remained a late–stage add–on.

Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers' needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value."

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"Although [Cindy] Sherman is often heralded as the quintessential 'postmodern' artist, the modernist tendencies of her work coupled with the critics' inability to confront the ambiguity of her work, have rendered her 'postmodern' label problematic. Postmodern theory advocates a deconstruction of the power structures embedded in late capitalist society. But Sherman's work functions seamlessly (and successfully) within the market strategies of the '80s, typified by corporate control of museums and market control of galleries. Given that her work can be read as both a challenge to the art market and a creative, marketable product, the boundary between postmodern critique of the market and marketability has clearly been eroded. While critics applaud Sherman's work for deconstructively denying the totality of a 'real Cindy', the meaning of her work is dependent upon the concept of the celebrity 'Cindy'. Simultaneously, critics partially negate her 'deconstruction', mythologizing her as the autonomous 'artist–genius', harkening back to the modernist heroization of the creative individual. On one level, Sherman's work appears to be subversively linked to 'low' art characterized by 'b–grade' film and photography, on another level, her work is fetishized as the modernist ideal of the 'high' art object."
(Nadine Lemmon)

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"The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the 'human person' Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author's 'person'."